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Development vs. Preservation in Modern China

Fans of the sci-fi blockbuster Avatar will recognize the otherworldly landscape of Wulingyuan. Along with soaring sandstone pillars, the park has a massive amount and diversity of flora and fauna. Keep your eyes peeled for the giant salamander and tusked Chinese water deer—both endangered—hiding amid the jungle-like greenery.

WHEN TO GO

Spring, when cherry and plum blossoms are bursting and before the stifling heat of summer.

HOW TO GET THERE

From Beijing or Shanghai, take a two-hour flight to Zhangjiajie City’s Hehua Airport, 23 miles from the park.

WHERE TO STAY

Use a tour operator such as WildChina to avoid language barriers and transportation headaches; you’ll be put up in one of many simple, tidy park-run inns.

By 2017, China will have more skyscrapers than the United States does. Jane Perlez reports on the places of extraordinary natural beauty that environmentalists and even the Chinese government are working to protect.

Secret China

Fans of the sci-fi blockbuster _Avatar_ will recognize the otherworldly landscape of Wulingyuan. Along with soaring sandstone pillars, the park has a massive amount and diversity of flora and fauna. Keep your eyes peeled for the giant salamander and tusked Chinese water deer—both endangered—hiding amid the jungle-like greenery.
**WHEN TO GO**
Spring, when cherry and plum blossoms are bursting and before the stifling heat of summer.
**HOW TO GET THERE**
From Beijing or Shanghai, take a two-hour flight to Zhangjiajie City’s Hehua Airport, 23 miles from the park.
**WHERE TO STAY**
Use a tour operator such as [WildChina](http://www.wildchina.com) to avoid language barriers and transportation headaches; you’ll be put up in one of many simple, tidy park-run inns.

Spring, when cherry and plum blossoms are bursting and before the stifling heat of summer.

HOW TO GET THERE

From Beijing or Shanghai, take a two-hour flight to Zhangjiajie City’s Hehua Airport, 23 miles from the park.

WHERE TO STAY

Use a tour operator such as WildChina to avoid language barriers and transportation headaches; you’ll be put up in one of many simple, tidy park-run inns.|||

The trail cut through tall camellia bushes, their glossy leaves shimmering in the noon heat, and past sycamores, oaks, and a grove of horsetail pines, lean and sinewy. Summer meant few flowers in southern China’s subtropical Guizhou Province, but the lush surroundings made up for the lack of pink and red rhododendron that bloom here in the spring. As we approached the crest of a hill above a sweeping valley, our pastoral reverie ended abruptly at what in modern China now seems the inevitable: a gouge cut deep and broad into the red earth of a forested slope. It was the beginnings of a road through this nature reserve that will take mostly domestic tourists to a theme park showcasing the dress, architecture, and customs of the Miao minority. Not even these remote forested hills have been left untouched in China’s rush for urban development.

I was traveling with Xiao Zesheng, a seasoned guide who told me that he has watched his province, among the poorest in China, change in just the past year from a scenic backwater to a construction site. My carefully choreographed trip to Guizhou had been designed as an immersion in what remains of China’s wilderness, a sojourn in a corner of the country that would highlight public and private efforts to preserve nature against the onslaught of the most aggressive industrial development the world has witnessed. WildChina, a travel company based in Beijing and recommended in Condé Nast Traveler, had promised me unsullied streams and waterfalls, hikes through pristine forests, and a chance to see plants and animals in their natural habitat.

The first hint that things might not go as planned came when I arrived at the airport in the provincial capital, Guiyang, to find a mammoth new international terminal nearing completion, its roof soaring skyward. I could see the worried expression on Xiao’s face as he explained that the government wanted to attract foreign tourists, particularly from Southeast Asia. “But I would like to keep Guizhou like Bhutan,” he said. In some respects, his affinity for the Himalayan kingdom, which limits the number of visitors, seemed reasonable: Guizhou is a small, remote province tucked away in the southwest, with wooded hills and scenic valleys dotted with Miao villages that could be a prime attraction for nature lovers both inside and outside the country.

But I was soon disabused of the notion that Guizhou could escape China’s industrial boom. Not far from the delightfully named Heaven Sent Dragon Hotel, heavy machinery was clearing land for apartment complexes. To the south of the city, large-scale roadworks exposed sand-colored rock face. Bulldozers were still moving in the evening half-light, and dust was everywhere as workers prepared the site for a major new highway that will link China’s interior to Fujian Province, on the east coast. At Shiqiao village, near a cave where the Miao people demonstrate the ancient art of paper making, welders were perched high on steel scaffolding. The sparks from their torches glinted, the noise piercing the stillness. Soon, the workers said, they would start drilling deep into the nearby stream to place five pylons that will carry the Shanghai-to-Kunming high-speed train across the ravine. Xiao shook his head. “I am so sad,” he told me. “It wasn’t like this a month ago.”

Guizhou, China’s poorest province, plans to develop ecotourism on a grand scale, but the central government is working furiously to industrialize the region. Residents, like this man and his nephew, stand to benefit economically either way.

The pace of urbanization in China is staggering. The country now has 370 cities with populations of between one and five million (the United States has 8 cities of that size), and 19 cities with populations of more than ten million—larger than any U.S. city. So rapid is the rate of development that even WildChina, which has numerous staff on the ground, was caught unawares. “The speed of construction and destruction is mind-boggling,” said Zhang Mei, who founded the tour company 12 years ago to showcase the country’s natural wonders for American visitors. “It’s a challenge faced by all the wild places in China.” Zhang said that she knew there was heavy road and rail construction in Guizhou, but that when she was last there, in June, there was nothing like the degree of construction that I witnessed. When I visited the area just two months later, I could see nature vanishing even from my guesthouse in the village of Paika, where a four-story building loomed outside my bedroom window. “I feel totally ashamed we can’t keep on top of it,” Zhang said of the development. “But this is the reality of China.”

In spite of the relentless development, China still has amazing biodiversity in habitats ranging from grasslands to tundra to snowy peaks. Much is being done now—both by the government and nongovernmental groups—to preserve it and to regain some of what has been lost. The country is home to 15 percent of the world’s vertebrate species and 12 percent of all plant species, making it third in the world for plant diversity, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (daphnes, camellias, and peonies are among the native Chinese flower varieties treasured by gardeners in the West).

Last year, the central government ordered Guizhou to catch up with development in the rest of China, and allocated more than $80 billion from Beijing for the instant makeover of the province, where an industrial zone is to be built in every prefecture. At the same time, provincial authorities have committed to spending $475 billion to develop ecotourism projects, though economists say that such astronomical figures are often cited by local politicians only to extract more money from the central government.

“Guizhou has identified ecotourism as a way to promote economic development, which is good because it should mean the conservation of natural resources,” said Xie Yan, one of China’s foremost conservation experts and a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. “But how it intends to achieve this is not clear. Maybe Guizhou can do a good job in ecotourism, but if the only goal of the province is to make money, nature will inevitably be sacrificed.”

Snub-Nosed Monkey This endangered species received a boost last year when one variety, the Nujiang golden monkey, was found in Yunnan Province. Until then, it had been spotted only in Burma, in 2010.

Conservationists caution that it’s unfair to compare China’s environmental programs to those in the rest of the world. “China has about the same landmass as the United States but four times as many people,” said Ma Jun, the founder of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a group funded by Chinese and American foundations. “In China there is always a mixture of nature and human habitat, so conservation has to be planned differently than in the United States,” where people are generally prohibited from living in protected areas.

Despite such population pressure, China has 208 National Scenic Areas, which are protected from drilling and dam construction. Another 480 Provincial Scenic Areas have also been accorded a limited level of protection by the government.

The concept of a national park as it is understood in the West, however, does not apply in China, say conservationists. The country has fewer than five national parks where resource extraction and human settlement are completely prohibited and has no legislation that establishes how they should be protected or even what criteria a park must meet.

The Jiuzhai Valley in Sichuan Province is a region of snowcapped peaks, glistening turquoise lakes flecked with exotic fish, and dense forests of oak, fir, birch, and bamboo. Pandas still roam on the upper reaches of the mountains. The valley’s Jiuzhaigou National Park covers roughly 448 square miles—­diminutive when compared with the nearly 2,000 square miles of Yosemite National Park. The area sits at the point where the Himalayas drop down from the Tibetan Plateau into the Sichuan Basin. In the early ’90s, UNESCO designated the park a World Natural Heritage Site, and the villagers, known as Aba Tibetans, were resettled to the periphery, where they run hotels and other small businesses to serve the ever-increasing number of tourists.

I visited in early August, shortly before my trip to Guizhou. It was during the peak tourist season, when middle-class Chinese travel in huge groups to see not only natural beauty but to observe how different ethnic groups live in the landscape. “China has its own advantage of a combination of cultural and natural heritage,” Ma said, and went on to explain that the idea of visiting a national park for scenic beauty alone is a new one here. Along some of the wooden boardwalks, tourists jostled shoulder-to-shoulder, chest-to-chest. The park rangers recommend maximum attendance of 12,000 visitors a day, but the authorities, eager for revenue, allow up to 30,000 a day during the peak season. ­Despite the crush of tourists, there was virtually no litter (a troop of 300 workers keep the walkways spotless). New toilet blocks were positioned at discreet points.

With WildChina’s knowledgeable guides and the luxury of being accompanied by senior park ranger Li Jian Yu—who likes to be called Jack—I explored splendid trails with no one else around.

The park is considered the exemplar for a combination of extraordinary beauty and sustainable tourism in China. It exists largely because it is one of roughly 20 isolated areas where the giant panda is found. A far-sighted scientist visited the region in the 1970s and, shocked at the denuded forest, persuaded Beijing to stop logging the area. It was soon designated a national park.

“If it weren’t for the fact that they wanted to save the panda, the logging would have continued,” Jack said. Even so, for several decades there have been no pandas in the lower reaches of the mountains, he told me.

In June, staff from the park found fresh panda scat among bamboo groves in an area 2,600 feet high, only about six miles from the tourist roads. “It’s the first evidence of panda activity inside the park in six years,” Jack said. The bear itself was not seen, but it was estimated from the scat that it had been in the area just two weeks before. Other wild animals roam the forest at higher reaches. The footprints of black bears, leopard cats, wild sheep, and deer can be found in the snow in the winter, Jack said.

On our first day, Jack and I walked about six miles around the park’s Shuzeng Valley. Its small lakes are jewels, threaded along the valley floor like a string of pearls, often separated from one another by exquisite waterfalls. Under the blue summer skies, the water sparkled, the reflections of the clouds and trees clear and crisp. In Peacock Lake, we watched silky smooth carp slither through the water. Birdlife in Jiuzhaigou Park is varied and attracts birding enthusiasts from the United States and Britain. A local guide, Philip He, carried a well-marked bird book of the 141 species found in the park. The star, he said, is the rufous-headed robin, a reclusive bird with a chestnut-colored head and a white throat with black markings. We did not see one, but there were plenty of other birds that Philip recognized from song or sightings. The chestnut thrush was quite common, a speckled pigeon made an appearance. Jack was disappointed that we missed the Sichuan jay. “It’s gray, not so beautiful, but a challenge to find.”

On our second day, we hiked another six miles, starting in a misty morning along a narrow, rocky trail toward a grassy plateau. A new young guide, Eva Dai, whose family lives in the area, joined us. She had left a better-paying job at a manufacturing plant near Beijing to come home to an exciting new career in nature. “This is more interesting, and I hope here I will have better prospects,” she said.

As we walked, there were moments when we could have been in an American garden surrounded by purple larkspur, a mauve flower that Philip identified as shady sage, varieties of aster, and pink flowers resembling cosmos. The trees were less familiar: larch, red-barked birch, and white pine, all species that do well in the cold winter months. It’s unusual but possible to see golden snub-nosed monkeys in the park.

My two trips showed me both the depth and wonder of China’s beauty and the clash between development and preservation in the world’s most populous, urbanized nation.

At Jiuzhaigou, real cooperation between the Sichuan provincial authorities and international conservation groups, alongside the science departments at Sichuan University, has led to the protection of the park’s interior, making it a remarkable haven by any standard. On the outskirts, large hotels and shopping centers of dubious architectural value crowd the roadside. They are ugly, but they’re outside the park in the township of Peng Feng. This is the price of allowing the residents who were moved out of the park to cash in on the exploding number of tourists. Hidden in the ugly sprawl, Zhou Ma’s Home—a family-run, old-style restaurant (beamed ceilings, no neon lights)—serves carefully prepared, totally delicious local Tibetan cuisine. I feasted on minced yak meat with cumin, potato dumplings mixed with roasted yak, and locally cultivated mushrooms poached in broth. After dinner, I repaired to the Sheraton, the only international hotel that serves the park.

The story of Guizhou is a more disturbing one. At Mo Fa’s guesthouse, in the village of Paika, a delicious hot pot meal of chicken soup thick with fresh mushrooms and eggplant awaited my arrival. The next morning, we sat on the balcony eating breakfast and discussing the future with his wife, Li Zimei, and their eight-year-old daughter, Mo Xiaoxia. Mo Fa grew up so poor that the sweet potato was his staple food as a child. He worked as a chef in the big cities of southern China until a few years ago, when he came home to invest in tourism. The wildlife has disappeared from the valley, he said. Mo’s father shot and killed a tiger in the 1970s, but they have not seen one since. The rare South China tiger, a tawny-colored animal, was last spotted in the nearby nature reserve of Lei Gong Shan 15 years ago.

The new building across the road from Mo’s guesthouse, which I had noticed when I arrived, will open soon as a high school. On the other side of his property, a new road will run along the valley. Yes, it won’t be so pretty, Mo said. But the school will bring education, and the road will bring guests, a more urgent need for the family than preserving what’s left of the green that surrounds them now.